SHORTLY after midnight on September 18, 1961, the world was stunned by
the news that a chartered DC-6 aircraft carrying the UN Secretary-General Dag
Hammarskjold (only the second man to hold the post at the time) had crashed
near Ndola, then Northern Rhodesia, Zambia today. Fourteen other people
including other UN employees also lost their lives. Hammarskjold was on a
peace-keeping machine in the newly independent Congo. At first pilot error was
blamed but it was not long before people were talking about foul play. That is
the way it stood until last year when The Guardian scored a great exclusive in
finding the man who was responsible for the crash. A Belgian pilot Jan van Risseghem
was identified as the man who shot down DC-6. He was never brought to justice,
he died before that.
ONE of the first people at the scene where bits of the DC-6 had come down
all over the place was Adrian Begg. At the time he was a policeman and later turned
his skills to journalism. We worked at The Nation in Nairobi. Like so many
people at the paper, he was a delightful chap. I tracked him down to an old
folks’ home in Victoria but have not been able to find any more about him. Below
is his report on the horrific crash site scene:
It began as a normal, quiet
Sunday shift at Ndola’s central police station, where I had been stationed as a
young assistant inspector since completing my training six months earlier – but
it soon became obvious there was something big on the go. Officers were being
called in from home, and in the early afternoon I was sent with a squad of
other officers to secure Ndola Airport and put it in security lockdown in
readiness for VIP arrivals. The word quickly spread among us that Dag
Hammarskjöld was expected.
A twisted propellor and the charred remains of an engine.
Investigators were able to deduce that the plane was operating under normal
approach power when it crashed.
My job was to secure the airport
car park, outside the perimeter fence, and at one point I was ordered to stop
the waiting media posse from following Katanga’s rebel leader Moise Tshombe,
who was being taken to a nearby government residence to await Hammarskjöld’s
arrival. As Tshombe’s car swept past I used the simple tactic of driving a
police Land Rover across the road, forming an effective blockade which brought
the media convoy to a screeching halt. It wasn’t a popular move – a couple of
the journalists were mates of mine.
It was a long, boring wait.
Nobody seemed to have any idea what time Hammarskjöld was due, and very little
information was filtering through to those of us on the ground. A plane landed
we thought must be his but we learned later that it was the British politician,
Lord Lansdowne, who had also come from Leopoldville.
Then, around midnight local
time, another plane arrived over the airport. From where I was standing near
the boundary fence, parallel with the runway, it was low enough to see the
cabin and navigation lights, all of which were on. It headed away towards the
west. Sometime later the runway lights were turned off and a senior officer,
Supt. Bob Read if memory serves me correctly, came out of the airport building
to tell the police on duty outside that we could stand down. We asked him why
the plane hadn’t landed and he just shrugged and said that apparently
Hammarskjöld had changed his mind and gone elsewhere which, we learned later,
was the official line set by Lord Alport, the British High Commissioner, who
had taken charge of the arrangements that day.
I went back to Ndola Central
police station to knock off, and before going home for the night a few of us
were sitting around in the control room drinking coffee and chatting about the
day’s events (or non-events, in the case of Hammarskjöld’s arrival). Marius van
Wyk, who had been on security duty at the house where Tshombe was staying,
arrived somewhat excited about what he had seen – a bright flash that lit up
the sky soon after Hammarskjöld’s plane flew over. This started us speculating
that something had happened to the plane.
Marius was sufficiently
convincing for me to phone the airport to report what he had seen. (Why I got
the job of making the call, I’m not sure. Probably because I was nearest the
phone). When I failed to get through, another officer, Keith Pennock, and I
drove to the airport which was then in darkness and apparently deserted (it was
after 3am). We went to the control tower, which was open, and found the radio
operator asleep. We woke him, told him of our concerns, and he said we should
tell John Williams, the airport manager, who had just returned from an overseas
holiday and was staying at the Rhodes Hotel in Ndola. We rang the hotel but got
no answer, so Pennock and I then drove there. Williams wasn’t overjoyed at
being woken up and I still recall his exact words when we told him what Marius
had seen, and our concern that this might mean the plane had crashed: “That
just doesn’t happen. VIP planes don’t crash.” He told us nothing could be done
in the middle of the night and there would be no point ordering an air search
before first light.
Did Williams know more than he
was letting on that night? I don’t think so. Obviously, he was irritable at
being roused from his bed by two very junior police officers, but my memory is
of a man grappling with a situation that was spiralling out of his control. I
believe he genuinely wanted to believe, as he told Keith Pennock and me, that
the plane would turn up safely on the ground somewhere in the morning.
Because we weren’t happy about
Williams’ apparent lack of concern, I phoned Mufulira police and suggested they
send out a road patrol to search in the area Marius had indicated. Then we
phoned one of our senior officers to report developments and to get his
permission for Ndola police also to send out a road patrol. Between them, the
patrols would cover the road between Ndola and Mufulira and hopefully, might be
able to spot burning wreckage.
(All three of us were very
junior officers. I was 20, Keith, as I recall, was 21, and Marius would have
been about 22, so we were taking quite a lot on ourselves in going against the
advice of an experienced airport manager that there was no cause for concern).
It is to my eternal regret that
our patrols failed to find the crash site that night as we might have been able
to save the life of Harold Julien, who was still alive at that time, and
perhaps even Hammarskjöld himself, who according to some sources, may have
survived for a short time after the crash.
A searcher picks his way through the wreckage, which was
strewn over a wide area.
On Tuesday, September 19, the
day after the discovery of the plane, I volunteered to assist the team working
on the ongoing search of the wreckage and took a number of photographs of the
devastation using Kodachrome 35mm slide film (these images have since been
digitised). While I was searching I found a body, believed to be that of the
Swedish security guard Pvt. Per Persson. The bodies of the other victims had
been removed the previous day, and because of initial confusion about the
number of people on board, Persson’s body, well hidden beneath the debris, had
been overlooked.
The body had what appeared to be
bullet wounds and my recollection is there was a 9mm sub-machinegun in the
wreckage nearby, which we surmised was the cause. He could well have been
holding the weapon on his lap when the plane crashed or maybe even have been
loading it preparatory to landing in what he would probably have considered to
be alien territory (there was no reason why the gun should have been kept
loaded during the flight, but obviously he would have wanted to be prepared for
anything once they landed).
The soldiers’ wounds remain one
of the mysteries of the crash, and like so many other questions that are still
being asked, we don’t know all the answers even after fifty years.
My view? As someone who for many
years was a journalist and who, during a brief career as a policeman had a very
minor role on the fringes of this tragic and momentous event, I’m tempted by
the theory of Ockham’s Razor. This tells us that when there are many competing
hypotheses, the simplest explanation is usually the most reliable.
